If you answered "yes" to any of the above questions, get ready to learn how to use personal blogs, e-mail, and branding to grow your travel business..

Your Brand Sets You Apart

Just like the brands of Williams-Sonoma®, Lexus®,, and Starbucks®, set them apart from their competitors, YOU! The BrandTM
sets you apart from your competitors — especially large online Web
sites. It also improves your search engine ranking, especially in
Google®.

Clients
frequently see little difference between travel products — one curved
shower rod in a hotel bathroom looks just like all the others. This
prompts clients to focus on price.

When this happens your client
is focusing on the wrong product. Before receiving a price quote, they
need to know you and the value you offer them.

YOU! The BrandTM sells you before selling travel products.

Your Brand Builds Loyal Relatioships

Most travel brands focus on destinations, products, and agencies, yet travelers buy from people — like you.

YOU! The BrandTM fills this gap by branding you — as an individual. After all, clients relate to you and they buy from you.

From 38,000 Feet . . .

YOU! The BrandTM
combines blogs, emails, domain names, and interesting
consumer content into one easy-to-use branding system. What's a
blog? Isn't branding painful? All that and much
more will be presented in the following sections.

Blogs

The term blog is a contraction of two words: Web and Log. A blog looks
like a Web site and has a Web address (URL) just like a Web site. You
enter a message about an interesting travel topic and visitors to your blog post their comments and reactions.

By
adding a new and interesting topic three or more times each week, your visitors routinely
stop by your blog. Every time they visit your blog their image of you
is reinforced and you are placed top-of-mind. This is the power of
brand management.

If you don't have time to write about
something new and interesting three to four times each week. That's fine. We suspected as
much, which is why we write and post the blog entries for
you. All you have to do is send people to your blog and take credit
for some interesting and lively conversations.

My most recent blog post is below or you can click here to visit my YOU! The BrandTM blog.

Regarding instruction about writing your own posts and growing your blog's readership . . . Yes, we provide monthly teleconferences that cover these topics and share other subscribers' experiences. The teleconferences are included in the YOU! the Brand subscription rate. . All you pay for is the phone call.

To help understand the effectiveness of blogs and their appeal to search engines. Go to www.google.com and search for Magellan360. This is my company and I've spent 6 years advertising and promoting its name. You should find about 1,300 results -- including a few of Magellan360's competitors ;-(.

Now, search for Ahlsmith and you will find about 12,000 results! This is almost 10 times more than my company name and I've only been blogging for two years.

There are many reasons why search engines like blogs more than Web sites, but one of the most important is "fresh content." Search engines love new pages of content and every time we post (at least three times per week) we create a fresh page of content.

Today, my blog (www.ahlsmith.com) has more than 8,000 unique weekly visitors. I started with about 200 and the rest have arrived by word-of-mouth marketing and the fact that they find the posts interesting and relevant. These are the same posts, we place on YOU! the Brand. blogs.

The "Road Less Traveled" and http://www.ahlsmith.com and http://katharinelancyctc.com websites were all down when I attempted to visit, which raised a question. Blogs also provide a public domain to spread negative feedback or information. We all know that customers that have had a bad experience love to tell people. What control do we have over the display / approval / removal of potentially damaging content?

Good points, David, and thank you for discovering an error in our domain name setup. We routinely setup domains so they can be accessed with or without the www prefix. It appears we didn't complete this setup for these domains. I'll fix that today, but in the mean time, you can access the blogs by at http://www.ahlsmith.com/ and http://www.katharinelancyctc.com/. Thank you for spotting this and letting me know.

Regarding negative comments . . . this is one of the most powerful aspects of blogs. Readers want to get to know the blogger, flaws and all. If a blog appears "sanitized" readers will doubt its authenticity.

As consumers, we know stuff happens. What we don't know is how an individual or person will respond and clean-up the mess. Blogs make this process visibile which improves a bloggers integrity.

Readers also appreciate a blogger's response to negative comments. They judge a blogger and her or his business by their ability to solve problems and make things right. Doing this in a public forum added credibility and integrity to the blog.

On the other hand, if someone spams your blog overt commercial offers or uses profanity, you can delete their comments.

Scott Ahlsmith, CTC

YOU! the Brand.TM Blog TemplatesChoose from a number of colorful and professional blog templates. Click here. to select a template for your
YOU! The Brand.
TM blog and know that you can change your blog's template at any time without losing any posts or comments.